The Downward Spiral of a Country Founded on False Premises

by
Thomas A. Droleskey

Although my now published anthology, Restoring Christ as the King of All Nations ($21.00, Chartres Communications, Post Office Box 188, Pine Island, New York 10969; $5.00 for shipping and handling), contains 469 pages of text dealing with the subject-matter contained in this brief article, I thought it to be necessary at this time to summarize why any nation, including the United States of America, that does not confessionally recognize the Sovereignty of Christ the King as exercised by the Roman Catholic Church is doomed the loss of everything it treasures, including the illusion of civil liberty.

1) There are limits that exist in the nature of things beyond which men have no authority or right to transgress, whether acting individually or collectively in the institutions of civil governance.

2) There are limits that have been revealed positively by God Himself in his Divine Revelation, that bind all men in all circumstances at all times, binding even the institutions of civil governance.

3) A divinely-instituted hierarchy exists in man’s most basic natural unit of association: the family. The father is the head of the family and governs his wife and children in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. Children do not have the authority to disobey the legitimate commands of their parents. Parents do not have the authority to issue illegitimate and/or unjust commands.

4) Our Lord Himself became Incarnate in Our Lady’s virginal and immaculate womb, subjecting Himself to the authority of His creatures, obeying his foster-father, Saint Joseph, as the head of the Holy Family, thus teaching us that all men everywhere must recognize an ultimate authority over them in their social relations, starting with the family.

5) Our Lord instituted the Catholic Church, founding it on the Rock of Peter, the Pope, to be the means by which His Deposit of Faith is safeguarded and transmitted until the end of time. The Church is the mater, mother, and magister, teacher, of all men in all nations at all times, whether or not men and nations recognize this to be the case.

6) The Pope and the bishops of the Church have the solemn obligation to proclaim nothing other than the fullness of the truths of the Faith for the good of the sanctification and salvation of men unto eternity and thus for whatever measure of common good in the temporal real, which the Church desires earnestly to promote, can be achieved in a world full of fallen men.

7) It is not possible for men to live virtuously as citizens of any country unless they first strive to for sanctity as citizens of Heaven. That is, it is not possible for there to be order in any nation if men do not have belief in access to and cooperation with sanctifying grace, which equips them to accept the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith and to obey God’s commands with diligence in every aspect of their lives without exception.

8) The rulers of Christendom came to understand, although never perfectly and never without conflicts and inconsistencies, that the limits of the Divine positive law and the natural law obligated them to exercise the powers of civil governance with a view towards promoting man’s temporal good in this life so as to foster in him his return to God in the next life. In other words, rulers such as Saint Louis IX, King of France, knew that they would be judged by Our Lord at the moment of his Particular Judgment on the basis of how well they had fostered those conditions in thier countries that made it more possible for their subjects to get to Heaven.

9) The rulers of Christendom accepted the truth that the Church had the right, which she used principally through her indirect power over civil rulers by proclaiming the truths of the Holy Faith, to interpose herself in the event that a civil ruler proposed to do something or had indeed done something that violated grievously the administration of justice and thus posed a grave threat to the good of souls.

10) The Social Kingship of Jesus Christ may be defined as the right of the Catholic Church to see to it that the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law are the basis of the actions of civil governance and that those who exercise civil power keep in mind man’s last end, confessionally recognizing the Catholic Church as the true Church founded by God Himself and having the right to reprimand and place interdicts upon those who issue edicts and ordinances contrary to God’s laws.

This is but a brief distillation of the points contained in the brilliant social encyclical letters of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, in particular, although Popes Gregory XVI, Blessed Pius IX, and Saint Pius X also contributed to their reiteration and explication. I have spent much time in the past fifteen years or so illustrating these points with quotations from these encyclical letters, which contain immutably binding teachings that no Catholic may dissent from legitimately (as Pope Pius XI noted in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio in 1922).

The Modern State, including the United States of America, is founded on a specific and categorical rejection of each of these points. Consider the following:

1) Martin Luther himself said that a prince may be a Christian but that his religion should not influence how he governs, giving rise to the contemporary notion of “separation of Church and state,” condemned repeatedly by Popes in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.

2) Martin Luther planted the seeds of contemporary deconstructionism, which reduces all written documents to the illogical and frequently mutually contradictory private judgments of individual readers, by rejecting the Catholic Church as the repository and explicator of the Deposit of Faith, making the “private judgment” of individuals with regard to the Bible supreme. If mutually contradictory and inconsistent interpretations of the Bible can stand without correction from a supreme authority instituted by God, then it is an easy thing for all written documents, including a Constitution that makes no reference at all to the God-Man or His Holy Church, to become the plaything of whoever happens to have power over its interpretation

3) The sons of the so-called Enlightenment, influenced by the multifaceted and inter-related consequences of the errors of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, brought forth secular nations that contended the source of governing authority was the people. Ultimately, all references to “God” were in accord with the Freemasonic notion of a “supreme intelligence” without any recognition of the absolute necessity of belief in and acceptance of the Incarnation and of the Deposit of Faith as it has been given to Holy Mother Church for personal happiness and hence al social order.

4) The Founding Fathers of the United States of America did not believe that it was necessary to refer all things in civil life to Christ the King as He had revealed Himself through His true Church, believing that men would be able to pursue “civic virtue” by the use of their own devices and thus maintain social order in the midst of cultural and religious pluralism. This leads, as Pope Leo XIII noted of religious indifferentism, to the triumph of the lowest common denominator, that is, atheism.

5) As the Constitution of the United States of America admits of no authority higher than its own words, it, like the Bible for a Protestant (as mentioned above), is utterly defenseless when the plain meanings of its words are distorted and used to advance ends that its framers would have never thought imaginable, no less approved in fact.

6) This is but the secular version of Antinomianism: the belief advanced by those who took the logic of Luther’s argument of being “saved by faith alone” to its inexorable conclusion that one could live a wanton life of sin and still be saved. Luther himself did not see where the logic of his rejection of Catholic doctrine would lead and fought against the Antinomians. In like manner, you see, the Constitutionalists and Federalists of today do not see that what is happening today in Federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the inexorable result of a Constitution that rejects Christ the King and the Catholic Church. These Constitutionalists and Federalists will fight time and time again like Sisyphus pushing the bolder up a hill. They will always lose because they cannot admit that the thing they admire, the Constitution, is the proximate problem that has resulted in all of the evils they are trying to fight.

I have written much in the past fifteen years about the fact that authentic love of one’s nation is not an exercise in empty sentimentality. There is a difference between patriotism, which wills the ultimate good of one’s nation, and nationalism, which idolizes the nation and all of its national myths. Patriotism is an obligation of the natural law. Nationalism is a sin against the First Commandment, resulting in the deification of a nation and its policies and its institutions and its rulers and its political parties as beyond criticism lest one be accused of disloyalty. Pope Leo XIII discussed this in Sapientiae Christianae in 1890. Pope Pius XI did so in Mit Brennender Sorge in 1937.

A Catholic, who is first and foremost a citizen of Heaven by means of having been incorporated as a member of the Catholic Church in the baptismal font, patriotically wills the Catholicization of the nation in which he has born or has taken citizenship. True patriotism is to will the subordination of everything in a nation (family life, economics, politics, law, education, culture, government, science, medicine, sports, entertainment) to the Deposit of Faith entrusted by Our Lord Himself solely to the Catholic Church.

Pope Pius XI illustrated this point by quoting Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, who had been a teacher of Saint Robert Bellarmine, in Divini Illius Magistri in 1929:

The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquility by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity.

It is not to “hate” one’s country to criticize the synthetic documents of her founding if these are premised on false principles. Does a parent “hate” his child when he has to correct him for doing something that is wrong? Does a friend “hate” an associate when he tells him that he might go to Hell for all eternity if he does not convert to the Catholic Faith? Tell men, then, how it is to “hate” one’s country to seek to realize here what produced as much order and happiness as can be realized in this vale of tears during the era of Christendom, the Middle Ages?

All of this comes to mind once again because of the United States Supreme Court decision that has given local governments the “right” to seize private property under the eminent domain clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution (how the Fifth Amendment got applied to the state governments and their municipal corporations is yet another example of mischief created by the Constitution’s religiously indifferentist foundations and whose history is a subject for a book in and of itself) so that said property could be used by private developers for some alleged economic benefit to a locality. Yes, this is a very egregious decision. Let’s put it in perspective, though, folks: if justices of the United States Supreme Court can endorse baby-killing on demand until the day of birth why in the world are we surprised that they can endorse the taking of private property by a local government to benefit private developers?

The problem is not with activist justices of the Supreme Court or judges on the Federal or state benches. No, the problem is the Constitution itself. A document that does not acknowledge the right of the Church to exercise the Social Kinship of Jesus Christ over men and their institutions of civil governance is utterly defenseless as repeated assaults against logic and reason become commonplace, rendering its plain words meaningless.

The rights of life, liberty and property outlined the Magna Carta in 1215 cannot be protected in any country over the course of time that is not confessionally Catholic. The Magna Carta was proclaimed, after all, in Catholic England at a time when the barons wanted to remind King John I that he was subject to limits beyond which neither he or the government he headed could not transgress. A country that does not recognize and submit to the Social Reign of Christ the King has no true safeguard for the rights of life, liberty and property. Such a country, including ours, becomes a dictatorship more and more over the course of time. And just as was the case with the Rome of the Caesars, replete with its own massive bureaucracy and cavalier, wanton lifestyles preoccupied with bread and circuses, the United States and all of her might and unlimited material pleasures and comforts will fall just as surely as Rome. Has anyone noticed the economic and military might of Red China lately?

Our Lord really meant it when He said that without Him we can do nothing. Nothing means nothing. At any time. In any circumstance. And He has given us the Fatima Message through His Most Blessed Mother, who told Blessed Francisco and Jacinta and the recently deceased Sister Lucia on July 13, 1917, that the path to world peace runs through Our Lady’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. Catholics must, therefore, stop complaining about criticisms of a governmental system founded on false, anti-Catholic premises and start storming Heaven that Pope Benedict XVI for the consecration of Russia to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart with all of the world’s bishops. We should pray three Hail Marys every day for Pope Benedict to faithfully fulfill Our Lady's Fatima Message.

To love the United States of America means to Catholicize her so that everyone in this land will one day exclaim in all of their activities the cry of Blessed Miguel Augustin Pro, Viva Cristo Rey!